Assessment of recharge potential zones for groundwater development and management using geospatial and MCDA technologies in semiarid region of Western India

Groundwater recharge potential (GWRP) plays a vital role as it directly or indirectly supports domestic, agriculture and industrial activities by infiltrating the rainwater. The present paper touches upon the methodology delineating groundwater recharge potential zones by applying geospatial and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to the derived thematic layers based on significant influence of occurrence of groundwater in semiarid watershed of Western India. The satellite imageries and other ancillary data were utilized to generate various thematic layers, viz. slope, geology, drainage density, surface run off, geomorphology, land use/land cover soil and vadose zone. The outcome of study shows that about 24.69% is having high GWRP and 24.17% of the area is moderate for recharge of groundwater, while the low and poor groundwater recharges potential area is about 44.34% and 6.80% of total area, respectively. The validation of the study was done by overlaying point data groundwater well yield on the output final map; it shows good correlation with result. Also, the surplus water availability was calculated based on vadose calculation according to CGWB method; it shows 17.12 MCM vadose region having artificial recharge of 22.77 MCM. The total recharge is about 117.41 MCM, about 30% of the total runoff, i.e. 35.22 MCM is considered as surplus monsoon runoff available for artificial recharge. The result shows that the use of remote sensing, geospatial and MCDA technologies are promising and efficiently recognize the suitable regions for groundwater recharge over other conventional techniques.